U.S.: hunt down perpetrators of Benghazi attack

The United States on Wednesday vowed to avenge the killings of its ambassador to Libya & other Americans, moving warships toward the Libyan coast & preparing to track the suspected perpetrators with surveillance drones, officials said.

The slain ambassador, Chris Stevens, helped save Libya's eastern city of Benghazi in the work of last year's revolution. They died there Tuesday night, along with another diplomat & State Department security officers, when a mob stormed the U.S. Consulate & set it ablaze.

The Benghazi consulate was of several American diplomatic missions that faced protests after the world wide web release of a film that ridiculed Muslims and depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a kid molester, womanizer and ruthless killer.

Cystic Fibrosis Disrupts Pancreas Two Ways in CF-Related Diabetes

A new University of Iowa study suggests there are two root causes of a type of diabetes associated with cystic fibrosis (CF). The findings, which already have sparked a clinical trial, may guide development of new treatments or even help prevent diabetes in patients with CF.

Almost half of patients with CF will develop diabetes by age 30 and almost one quarter will develop it in their teens. In addition to the health problems caused by high blood sugar, diabetes also worsens lung disease and increases the risk of dying for people with CF. However, the underlying cause of CF-related diabetes is not well understood, and differs from the causes of type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

Using a new animal model of CF, the study found two abnormalities that affect the pancreas, the organ that produces insulin, which controls blood sugar levels. The study shows that CF progressively damages the pancreas, disrupting insulin production. More surprisingly, the study also found that CF disrupts the pancreas' insulin production even before the physical damage occurs. The results were published Sept. 17 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Ferrets used to study CF-related diabetes

The UI team studied ferrets with CF that were recently developed in the lab of John Engelhardt, Ph.D., professor and head of anatomy and cell biology at the UI Carver College of Medicine.

"We turned to ferrets because studies in humans and mice have been unable to determine the underlying cause of many CF complications, including diabetes," Engelhardt says. "We found that ferrets with CF, just like humans, spontaneously develop diabetes leaving them unable to prevent high blood sugar levels following a meal."

In humans, CF damages the pancreas, which reduces insulin production. The researchers, including lead authors Alicia Olivier, Ph.D., UI assistant professor of pathology, and Yaling Yi and Xingshen Sun, Ph.D., from Engelhardt's lab, found that CF ferrets developed diabetes at 1-2 months of age, the same age the ferrets experienced severe damage to the pancreas.

"This finding fits well with the long-held view that CF-related diabetes stems from physical damage to the pancreas, which limits the amount of insulin the pancreas can produce," says study co-leader Andrew Norris, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and biochemistry.

Engelhardt and Norris also are members of the Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center at UI.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120917152051.htm

High-Flying NASA Aircraft Develop New Science Instruments

Over the next few weeks, an ER-2 high altitude research aircraft operating out of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., will take part in the development of two future satellite instruments. The aircraft will fly test models of these instruments at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet to gather information researchers can use to develop ways to handle data future spaceborne versions will collect.

NASA Wallops will be the temporary home of one of NASA's ER-2 research aircraft. The ER-2 from NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., will carry two instruments, the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) and the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL). CATS and MABEL are test beds for instruments to be carried by future satellite missions, and because they are both high-altitude laser instruments they will share space on the ER-2 in part as a way to lower costs for both teams. The ER-2's deployment began on Sept. 7 and will end no later than Sept. 27.

CATS is a high spectral resolution lidar that uses a laser to gather data about clouds and aerosols. Aerosols are tiny particles in the atmosphere such as dust, smoke or pollution. Similar instruments on existing satellites, such as CALIPSO, can detect aerosol plumes, but cannot determine what they are made of.

"You have to make some assumptions," said atmospheric scientist Matt McGill at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. CATS can better detect aerosol particle properties, allowing researchers to better determine what kind of aerosols the plumes are made of and improve studies of aerosol transport and cloud motion. CATS was designed as a test instrument for the future Aerosol-Cloud Ecosystems (ACE) satellite mission, which is still in its planning stages, and a version of CATS will be installed on the International Space Station in mid-2013.

MABEL is a laser altimeter built to simulate the primary instrument on ICESat-2, scheduled for launch in 2016. ICESat-2 will study land and sea ice and vegetation. In April, a NASA ER-2 carrying MABEL flew surveys of land and sea ice out of Keflavik, Iceland, which yielded large amounts of data that researchers are using to develop algorithms for ICESat-2.

This time around, MABEL will measure vegetation along the U.S. East Coast, which will provide data useful for developing methods for determining the amount and thickness of vegetation coverage. This involves measuring both the tops of tree canopies and ground level at the same time, which Kelly Brunt, a cryospheric scientist at NASA Goddard, said is a challenging task. The ICESat-2 team's need to measure deciduous forest canopies is in part of why these flights will operate out of Wallops. "We can't get the type of vegetation canopy we need flying out of Dryden," Brunt said. The ER-2 will be surveying forests and grasslands from Maine to the Florida Everglades.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120917204355.htm

Cyber clues link U.S. to new computer viruses

BOSTON (Reuters) - Researchers have found evidence suggesting that the United States may have developed three previously unknown computer viruses for use in espionage operations or cyber warfare.

The findings are likely to bolster a growing view that the U.S. government is using cyber technology more widely than previously believed to further its interests in the Middle East. The United States has already been linked to the Stuxnet Trojan that attacked Iran's nuclear program in 2010 and the sophisticated Flame cyber surveillance tool that was uncovered in May.

Anti-virus software makers Symantec Corp of the United States and Kaspersky Lab of Russia disclosed on Monday that they have found evidence that Flame's operators may have also worked with three other viruses that have yet to be discovered.

The two security firms, which conducted their analyses separately, declined to comment on who was behind Flame. But current and former Western national security officials have told Reuters that theUnited States played a role in creating Flame. The Washington Post has reported that Israel was also involved.

Current and former U.S. government sources also told Reuters that the United States was behind Stuxnet. Kaspersky and Symantec linked Stuxnet to Flame in June, saying that part of the Flame program is nearly identical to code found in a 2009 version of Stuxnet.

For now, the two firms know very little about the newly identified viruses, except that one of them is currently deployed in the Middle East. They are not sure what the malicious software was designed to do. "It could be anything," said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team.

http://news.yahoo.com/cyber-clues-u-computer-viruses-130127756--finance.html

The man behind anti-Islam film

Lily Dionne had been in Hollywood a week when she answered an ad on Craigslist looking for actors for an action-adventure film called "Desert Warrior."
Now, Dionne says she feels betrayed by the California filmmaker who turned the low budget-movie with a threadbare plot into an anti-Islam film that provoked outrage -- with sometimes violent results -- in parts of the Muslim world.


When news broke that violent mobs attacked the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi, leaving Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead, she was overwhelmed.
"I was shaking when I found out. I had no idea," Dionne told CNN on Sunday. "This was a movie that I thought no one would ever see."


Dionne knew the filmmaker as Sam Bacile. But federal officials say his name is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a convicted felon with a history of using aliases to hide his actions.
Anti-Islam filmmaker meets with probation officer
They consider Nakoula to be the filmmaker behind "Innocence of Muslims," an amateurish film that portrays the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizer, buffoon, ruthless killer and child molester.
Islam categorically forbids any depictions of Mohammed, and blasphemy is an incendiary taboo in the Muslim world.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/17/world/anti-islam-filmmaker/index.html?hpt=wo_c1

Angry royals take Kate's topless photo to court

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/17/world/europe/uk-royals-photo-controversy/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

More topless photos of Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, spilled into public view Monday as Britain's royal family asked a French court to stop further publication of the pictures.

The legal battle raged while the duchess and her husband, Prince William, carried on with an official tour of the South Pacific, including meetings with Solomon Islanders -- some of them topless.The new photos were published Monday by the Italian gossip magazine Chi, which is owned by the same company that last week published several pictures of a topless Catherine sunbathing in private during a vacation at a private chateau belonging to William's uncle in Provence, in southern France.The grainy images, shot from a distance, show Catherine on a balcony and appear to be no more revealing than those published last week by the French magazine Closer, the Guardian newspaper reported.Editor Michael O'Kane was suspended Monday by Independent Star Limited, the publisher of the Irish Daily Star, pending an investigation into the circumstances that led to photographs being republished in the French magazine.

Avaaz TPP agreement causes unprecedented threat to democracy

More than half a million people have called on business and political leaders meeting in Virginia to reject the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty. If this deal proceeds, the global campaign group Avaaz is warning that it could allow corporate interests from Big Pharma to Big Oil to Big Tobacco an unprecedented way to override decades of public interest protections -- on everything from health and environmental regulations to a free internet.

Almost 600 corporate representatives have had a direct line into the creation of the TPP, yet most of our elected officials have no idea what is being negotiated. Leaked sections of the TPP suggest it was written to shield businesses from government regulations designed to protect the public interest. Examples of this include undermining protections for air and water, reintroducing measures from an earlier US attack on internet freedom known as SOPA, and steamrolling efforts to produce generic affordable medicines.

http://oneworldgroup.org/2012/09/16/avaaz-fights-secret-agreement/?ow_print=y